Are Call Numbers a ?Morale? downer?

There are few managers in Call Centers. There are plenty of Supervisors, Controllers or Administrators who would use such metrics(?) as call numbers as a measure of effectiveness, but these people are not Managers.

As a field tech, we are judged by the numbers we generate, but it's much different out here than it is in an office, sitting behind a desk. I've seen the routines and scripts that these help desk people are supposed to follow. That's why we have a seperate help desk and different numbers to call for real technical help, not some flow chart follwing non technical person. I do feel that the numbers generated by such methods leave a lot to be desired and as such don't tell the whole story. Communication is the biggest determining factor as to whether the person taking the call can understand what the caller is saying, either in technical or non-technical terms. It is said that a lot gets lost in the translation.

Having worked in call centers for many years (Including a year at the Unisys Helpdesk you mentioned) I'm familiar with all these different performance metrics. My experience is that they definitely CAN be a morale downer if not explained properly to the person who'se performance is being measured.

Many techs have an attitude that as long as they fix the problem the end-user calls about, they're doing a good job, even if it takes them a long time. They don't see the business side of why low Average Handle Time(AHT)and High First Call Resolution (FCR) is important because they do not understand how much each support call can cost a business.

I find that as long as some attention is given to explaining these factors to employees they are more easily accepted, but some Supervisors/Managers seem to have an attitue that techs can't be expected to see "the big picture" and thus just expect them to "comply and deal with it". In my experience this generates bad morale and a high turnover rate.

Techies are usually intelligent people who like to have a good understanding of a situation in order to resolve problems as effectivly as possible. If they understand WHY the business side is so important, they'll be more inclined to find an effective way to support these metrics without feeling the same degree of resentment.

worked for a organization as a NOC Tech.,
that had a very high call count due to internal and external users. The calls
were initially logged by the Call Center,
and escalated to the NOC if need be.
Needless to say, the call 'tickets' were poorly documented at first.
[ex. call description: pc doesnt work,
call resolution: fixed pc] so mgmt started
reviewing the tickets and req'd better documented tickets, which also could be used for future reference. Also, we needed to track the amount of time per issue.
Mgmt would spot check tickets for clarity etc. and if not appropriate, the offender notified, and also used for eval. purposes.
You also have to watch out for people who know that numbers are being used and log tickets to get their count up.
Numbers arent everything, you can run into an issue that you spend hours trying to resolve, but does that mean the guy that resolved 10 tickets did better than the guy that spent 8hrs straight working to fix a single user/customer's issue ?

In my recent stint as a retail CE for a large co that used to make cash registers I find that the metrics that started as a productivity aid have morphed into a whip for management to use whenever they don't like the numbers. They clearly do not know what the numbers are telling them.

For example: Fill Rate is used to determine how often the part you need is in your vehicle - they add variety to the mix of customer equipment and complain about low fill rate. The two elements are in conflict. They will have us drive 45 minutes in order to hit an SLA instead of servicing a customer 5 minutes away then complain about productivity numbers.
Morale is definately driven down by micro metric management. More techs and fewer bean counters would equate to an increase in customer satisfaction. There seems to be a pervasive thought pattern that has convinced mgmt that if you had enough metrics and monitored them very closely the company would only need one customer engineer...and I think his name is Santa.

I know the feeling well. I worked at a place where the inbound call volume get crazy for a couple of months. I filled out page upon page of detailed notes that I know for a fact Nobody ever looked at. With one exception: complete techno know-nothing site managers. Stuff they should not under any circumstances need to know or concern themselves with. It got so bad I blew out my arm with severe tendinitis. Took me 9 months to rehab it.
Misuse of metrics and call logging has extremely serious consequences for the most defenseless class of skilled tech workers. In my mind it is up to senior IT personnel to ensure that the lower levels are not being abused to gratify management's metrics fetish. I am finally senior enough to do something about it; and I do. Starting with an ergonomic workspace and going on from there.

Anybody in the tech world has had to rapidly adapt to lower cost global competition. This has led to an intense focus on costs and productivity and therefore metrics. We're all measured one way or another - students test scores determine their grades whether or not the tests really determine how well they learned the material. Metrics will never be perfect, but it's all we have.

Metrics are valuable when used by good managers, because they measure the correct performance aspects with them consistently. Good managers always operate against a criteria of business purpose.

So, in a sense call centre metrics could actually be viewed as correct form. Good business? No way. Quality customer support? No way. But consider that most call centres now are actually third party entities, even if inside a corporate subsiduary. The higher volume they close, the more they probably charge-back to the primary business unit. Consequently, the job of the manager there is to produce call volume, not client satisfaction.

This neatly explains the atrocious levels of customer service we have almost everywhere today; and it explains the state of most call centres.

Having written that, though, call centres are almost all bad business decisions. They thrive today because everything is viewed as disposable, and therefore there is little attention paid to long-term satisfaction. Every commodity is sold by price point, or so the view goes, and to most of the unifornmed customers, that does describe their buying behaviour.

I used to blame call centre managers for the grief their staff often causes, but I now simply blame the poor folks who work there. That may seem counterproductive, but realistically the ones who don't care at all will never be affected by my bad attitude, and the ones that do will probably be helped to leave because of it. They deserve better, and the call centres don't deserve them. The faster they leave, the better the world becomes.

As to the comment that we need to get over this, having been in business now for myself for 20 years, accepting poor productivity, wrong metrics and bad business practices isn't wise. Using the concept of global competition to excuse laziness and bad management is foolish. One good technician providing true quality support pays for themselves rapidly in return business. The people you really want for customers expect that.

There's nothing wrong with using these measures to track performance, as long as they are treated only as indicators, and not requirements/quotas.

I worked as a Tech Support specialist for several years for a software company (anyone remember PC Tools?). We were given goals of 10 minute average call times. In a review, my manager said my average call times were closer to 13 minutes, but he did not put much weight on this because records also showed that the quality of my work was high (few callbacks, which I suppose translates to a high "1st call close rate").

It wasn't until the company outsourced Tech Support, and many of us went to work for the outsource company. I became frustrated almost immediately, and left after about a year.

Outsource call centers are paid a per-call rate by their clients. So these charlatans are motivated not by quality of service, but by number of calls. Today, friends who still work for these horrendous companies tell me their call times are closer to 4 minutes. TRUE technical SUPPORT is a thing of the past.

seems as though company's have the slogan,
customer service is our number 1 goal, but havent quite figured out that the call center needs to be staffed with people that do more than talk nice to them and tell them how many different ways they can kiss their butt. when users/clients call with an issue, they want immediate attention, not wanting to wait hours or days before the ticket is finally escalated to Tier 3 support to be resolved.

You could handle a really high number of calls and look like a hero by those counts, but if you didn't help the callers resolve their issues, you're a zero. Yet, because of the high number of calls handled, other call center folks will feel inferior even though they actually did a better job.

Forget the call volume for each technician and concentrate more on how many calls were resolved and how quickly. This is what really matters.

One way to collect this information, aside from having the call center tech keep track,
is to have the callers respond to a very quick survey: 1)was the tech courteous?, 2) did they resolve your problem?, 3) how long did the problem resolution take?: a) very short time b) resonably short time, c) acceptable amount of time, d) quite a bit of time, or e) unreasonably long time.

If you ask for the specific amount of time it took to resolve the problem, most "customers" won't remember and will guess which can skew the results unfairly in some cases.

Something like this should keep the call center morale higher... it's a tough job, why make it worse.

is not that the bottom line exists, but that it has apparently grown to the exclusion of all else, including customer satisfaction. Just as no business can continue to operate without making a profit, no business can grow without customer satisfaction.

When I was teaching, I also had students working in call centers. Most of them lasted less than three weeks. Their major complaint: they were not allowed to deviate from the [poorly designed] script even when the deviation would have increased their First Call Resolution and reduced their Average Handle Time while also eliminating an insult to the customers' intelligence.

For example: Very often, their customers would provide a monitor symptom of "The light comes on green, but then turns yellow." The monitor fault chart started with "Is the equipment plugged in?" Many workers at this call center were disciplined for skipping this step to the Yes branch.

The use of these faux metrics for Call Centers are meaningless unless tied in with effective root cause analysis. Why should the users have to make continual calls because of an underlying failure of design/implementation? In their current form such statistics document how quickly calls can be answered and the clients then fobbed off.
What the statistics fail to measure is the number of dissatisfied customers who take their business elsewhere as a consequence of useless call center interactions.

since the person who gets hit with an absolute tyro with computers that has a fairly serious problem will be tied up longer so will have fewer calls.

look at the customer satisfaction level per call center employee, that is the best metric to use for evaluating performance of them.

the number of times they have to call the supervisor at customer request is a starting point for customer satisfaction level evaluations

I've worked at Helpdesks that focus on the numbers of tickets generated. The programs used for tracking the tickets generate TONS of metrics. Enough to make a statistition go nuts.

The fact is managers/supervisors, (whatever you call them) can be so numbers oriented, they totally lose sight of what the purpose of the job is - to satisfy the customer! This attitude gets passed on to the techs and that's what causes the stress in the techs. The techs believe the people on the other end of the phone are what's important. The manager, who is focused on generating a good-looking report to their supervisor, has lost that belief.

And when it comes down to it, what do all those numbers mean anyway? I have racked my brain for the past 10-12 years trying to figure out a GOOD way to measure a Helpdesk/Call center. The only conclusion I can come up with is to have a third party conduct surveys with the customers on their satisfaction with the service and the tech.

It's happy customers you want. When people call, it's because they're frustrated, have a problem they cannot solve, and want/need a CORRECT answer. Vehicle repair centers face similar difficulties. People want their car repaired correctly - the FIRST time and at a reasonable price. People will return to the garage that costs $70/hr for labor over and over again, if they KNOW they're getting quality service, are treated with respect, and honesty!

I say meet the customers needs and exceed them and damn the numbers. I don't fix numbers, I repair the PC problems people have. I speak to them on their terms. I listen to them and let them vent. And in that process I repair their probelms, answer their questions, and make them feel they're going to make it through.

Let's face it, that Call Centers are a supplier's attempt to shift cost to the customer by reduction of service levels. Vendors employ call centers so that expensive skilled staff will not be diverted in answering customer enquiries.
In an effort to utilise unskilled staff at the call center they are given pre-written scripts to answer common enquiries. This is boring work which makes it difficult to motivate the staff receiving the phone calls. As a consequence it is difficult to manage and retain staff unless they are trapped there for external reasons. In an effort to reduce the management input (cost) to the poorly motivated public facing staff the supervisors in charge impose naive simple metrics that only measure part of the total response system. Those are called "Call Numbers" and are as such pretty useless measures of unsatisfied clients.

Those unsatisfied clients will find alternative suppliers. As a consequence the vendor (with the poor Call Centre) has to invest more in Marketing & Advertising to gain new clients. This increases costs.

If a product is cheap, through low costs, but is unreliable and needs a lot of calls to a poor call center the public will stop buying the product.

However to say from an insulated academic stance: "If you do not like those metrics form your own business..." is an invalid argument from someone not actually involved in commerce.

The use of numbers for a call centre evaluation is fine but they need to be put into context. Two problems can look the same on the surface but could be vastly different when they are investigated. The reality needs to be taken into account which unfortunately is not the case. Prehaps it is because the people who use the numbers do not always have a good grasp of the problem

Call numbers are a vital piece of information for a business. They are used to help determine a need for more staff or what areas require the longer calls. Sometimes however, when they are used exclusively to analyze an employee the numbers become a detriment to the business. In situations where the numbers are the be all and end all Help Desk personnel focus only on getting the call finished and getting to the next one. How often does that attitude reflect itself to the customer? This is something that doesn't get measured. How many customers refuse to call back or do any further business with that company because of such a call?

The same is true for companies that keep metrics on bugs in code. Metrics are great resources to see the overall health of a project. Metrics can also be used to measure the effectiveness of a QA engineer or the efficiency of a developer. If they are the only thing used though, then they become a huge "morale downer" and thus are detrimental to the project they are supposed to help.

I work in a company that contracts out our help desk services. Metrics is how we show we fullfill our contract or secure a contract. On the other hand... what we measure, how we measure it, and how it's used constantly evolves.

Call time is used, but as a guide line. The target is 20 calls a day, AVERAGE. Some days a person can handle more (monday password resets / unlocks for instance) and some days less (tracking down an intermittant problem). Our management is constantly looking for ways to show a metric for our time spent doing research to solve a customer issue. Our metrics survey customer satisfaction as well as first call rate. We are also given the latitude to be proactive with our customers - we are looking for ways to teach our customers to be more computer savey - so they can be more productive and aid them when they do need to contact us.

In short - our metrics constantly evolve as we identify what it is the calling customer wants and what the contracting customer wants and what qualities we see as exceptional service. That, an the fact that our direct management has worked in the trenches at one time or another and are aware of what we do and work as our advocates to the higher management levels who haven't a clue as to what it is like on the front lines.

If your company's management paradigm is so outmoded or unsophisticated that it relies almost exclusively on numbers spit out by cold software analytics, for deciding on whether or not to keep certain people, especially if you post them for all to see, then you deserve the grumbling, unmotivated clock-punchers you get. End of discussion.